Joely Sue Burkhart

I have 7 loose sections remaining in this short-ish story.  It’s already 6600+ words, and I average about 1K per section.  So yeah, I’m like halfway, and the story’s due 7/31.  *panic!!*  On the up side, I’ve got up to 17,500 words to tell this story, so the size is right on.  I just need time to write it!

Here’s a breakdown of the remaining sections only, and I’ll document my progress for Sven this weekend.  I WILL FINISH BY THE DEADLINE.  Somehow.  Alien Goth is too cool to not at least submit for consideration in the anthology.

Edited:  Well, I’m already editing my block, because I’m not quite ready to move to The Inner Sanctum section.  Added “aaa” below, a bridge to the rest of the block.

Theme Songs:  Bring Me to Life, Sweet Sacrifice, and My Immortal by Evanescense

Notes:  Yikes, I hope the other sections aren’t as long as the first!  Good stuff, though.  maybe a little too infodumpy in places, but Link is at last explaining some of the mystery, and Amee’s secret has come out.  Quite charming, I hope.

Closing notes for the night:  I’ve got two heating pads going, one for my back, one for my neck.  My eyes are killing me.  But I’m extremely pleased with what I’ve got so far.  I locked myself in my office after dinner and only emerged for short breaks.  I sat with That Man and watched a brief cooking show so he didn’t feel totally neglected, and then helped put the monsters to bed.

I’m in the big love scene of the story, The Red Coat section.  Ah, I love it when a seemingly innocent little item becomes suddenly very important.  I love tying things together like that.  When I wrote that opening scene (below in Friday Snippets), I had no idea how important that red coat was.  At first, I chose red on a whim.  Then it became a silent stab at Dr. Linkyn’s pride, tying to his backstory in a significant manner.  And now, in the final sections of the story, it’s an instrument of love and healing.  Cool stuff.

I should be able to finish the first draft tomorrow.  Yay!  There’s at least one thread I need to go back and fix that I noted tonight (at the beginning of the Inner Sanctum section, I need that red coat deposited in a significant manner).  I’m pretty sure I know how the big mystery plays out.  We’ll see tomorrow. 

No new words last night.  Sigh.  I ended up giving the first 14 pages a nice solid edit to smooth and tie in some elements I discovered in the middle of the story.  The deadline is ticking and I have a big chunk of story to do yet.  *panics*  Plus Littlest Monster threw up after dinner last night and complained of a headache all night and this morning.  Let’s see how she feels the rest of the day.

We had company briefly today, a very nice visit, but of course we had a cleaning marathon.  *sheepish*  The front two rooms of the house look pretty good; just stay out of the bedrooms. 

I’ll update later tonight once I get some good progress made.

First Update:  Finished editing the whole thing, roughly 23 pages, 6617 words.  I have half a dozen pages of scribbled notes and brainstorming for the final third to half of the story, but it’s all jumbled.  I’m going to take a little time before dinner to organize my thoughts and notes so I can fly through a few scenes… hopefully rather quickly.